About Springboard Foundation
The Springboard Foundation was founded in 1998 by 10 young professionals with the desire to get personally involved in improving the lives of Chicago inner-city children. From that first year, in with Springboard distributed $50,000 in grants, Springboard has more than 45 members.
Their primary area of focus is after-school and supplemental education programs. Since its inception in 1998, the Springboard Foundation has helped numerous programs grow and became self-sustaining. These programs continue to provide inner city children with educational opportunities outside of school.
Challenge
- Redesign of their site to streamline the member scheduling and grant organization
- Automating the process of gathering potential grantee applications that up to that time had been completed manually and included scanned documents and financial reports
- Managing scheduling of the site visits as well as the process of gathering feedback and assigning grants.
Solution
Promet used the Drupal CMS to automate the following processes:
- Enter grant applications and collect financial and governance documents
- Report on grant applicants
- Group reviewers in team
- Streamline review team information
- Create calendar scheduling application
- Coordinate team availability as well as grantee geographical locations and operating times
- Create review and grant award process
Implementation
Data Management
Promet created custom CCK fields to collect and present grantee information. The views module was used to display this information in several easy to use reports.
Process
Promet identified all the processes involved in gathering grantee information, renewal process, as well as outside service provider services. They focused on using these mapped out processes to create a web application, which would streamline the information flow.
Scheduling
Promet focused on creating an easy to use calendar system that used coloring schema and teaming information to provide team availability and overlapping visit schedules.
Information Dissemination
In order to remove "the binder" from the established use, Promet focused on providing the best possible reports of the grantee information. As the teams had a very short window to plan, visit, and rate the grantees Promet always provided geographical information by utilizing Google maps and it's API extensively.
Why Complex Web App Development?
The Springboard Foundation not only needed an easy to maintain modern CMS for their website, the Foundation needed an application process, a scheduling application and an easy way for members to share information. Drupal provided the flexibility needed to implement a CMS as well as create a back end process accessible only to members.
